Most poems develop slowly: they begin at a certain place and proceed logically to another place. However, in Auden´s poem we are in the same place, from beginning to end. Auden has probably written it in this way to emphasize/transmit an important feature of Modern Man: his/her(?) predictability and dullness. We are all expected to comply with certain standards: have a certain amount of kids, follow a certain amount of steps, do a certain amount of things during the course of our lives...

No matter how original we want to be, in the end, we are Modern Men, numbers, statistics, very much concerned with “doing the right thing”. Does this lead us to happiness? We don´t know, may be we don´t care. Still if we do care, there is nothing we can do to change the way life seems to be.

Auden presents a poetic definition (isn´t the whole poem a definition?) of a person caught up in the tight fabric of his/her age.

Using Auden´s adjectives from the poem: are we “normal”? “proper”? “right”... enough?

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